Metabolic aspects of acute starvation in normal humans (10 days).

T HERE ARE DIVERSE OPINIONS on the physical and mental effectiveness of men operating in the field without any food but with water ad libitum for 3to 10-clay periods. Many abnormalities are associated! with long-term starvation and semistarvation. Canadian POW’s who had been on restrictedi intakes in camps in Singapore and! Hong Kong during World War II wei-e studied more than 10 years after being released (1). Some of the frequent symptoms observed inchmclecl easy fatigability, plofuse sweating for no apparent reason, numbness and! cl-amps in the calf muscles, loss of ambition, poor vision, edema, dyspnea on even the slightest exertion, depression tachycardia, anorexia, nausea, i-estlessness, irritability, and insomnia. Body composition chamiges are usually quite marked and one must be especially careful in the interpretation of the data on fat loss, especially if good watelbalance data are not available. In a 4.5 day totalstal-vation study by Taylor et al. (2), it was reported that an 18% decrease in plasma volume and! an 8% decm-ease of thiocyanate space occurred. The authors assumed that these fluid losses accounted for 37%